The present invention relates to an improvement in automatic announcement systems particularly adapted to be connected to telephone trunks and to automatically deliver announcements in response to incoming calls on the trunks. In recent years such announcement systems have become more sophisticated and provided to the subscriber a variety of options for providing announcements of information and advertising material to an incoming caller.
Typically, the user of such announcement systems will be a subscriber institution which wishes to provide a public service such as announcements of time of day or present temperature to an incoming caller. The subscriber has the system arranged so that the announcement of the information concerning time or temperature is preceded by a brief advertisement for the services or goods of the subscriber.
Previous systems for automatically providing time of day announcements have included a clock system which drives a register, either solid state or relay, to select the particular vocal announcements indicating the correct time of day. A common arrangement in previous systems has included a rotating magnetic drum with a plurality of vocabulary words appropriate for announcing numerical quantities such as the time of day recorded in an analog fashion thereon. In response to the condition of the time of day register, a plurality of reproducing heads are lowered onto the drum in an appropriate sequence so that the individual string of reproduced words correctly reflects the time of day. For example, if the time of day is 3:05, the first head to be lowered would select the recording of the word "3" followed by selection of a track on the drum where the recording for "OH" followed by selection of the track containing the vocal recording of "5". More recent systems have included multiple recordings of some of the words with appropriate inflections for occurring at the beginning, middle or end of a time of day announcement.
Similarly, systems which include temperature announcement include a transducer which monitors the present outside temperature and controls an announcement of temperature in a similar manner.
The recording of the advertising material has simply been placed on a drum and precedes the sequence of the information announcement.
In practical use, the subscriber often wishes to change the nature of the announcement either by changing the voice character or the copy of the advertising material, in order to avoid boredom on the part of callers or to announce an advertisement for a new product or service. Heretofore it has been necessary to physically change the analog recording at the location of the announcement equipment, which usually involves recording a new drum at a remote location and physically delivering same to the announcement equipment.
Furthermore, upon changes in the time of day, most commonly occurring in the United States on the semi-annual change between standard time and daylight savings time, it has been necessary for an attendant at the announcement equipment to physically change the contents of the time of day register at an appropriate time in order to reflect the new time of day. Needless to say, this puts an extreme workload on personnel servicing the announcement systems in a very short period of time concentrated around the dates upon which the time changes occur.
Furthermore, the necessity of recording new analog drums on specialized equipment and physically delivering same to location of announcement system involves considerable expense, and necessitates a delay between the time the decision to change is made and the time the new announcement is actually on line to be provided to callers. It will also be appreciated that previous systems have required the shutting down of the entire announcement system in order to make such a change in the drums for a new announced advertisement.
Furthermore, it is common for such announcement systems to maintain a count of the number of calls received, which count is used in billing subscribers who are leasing use of announcement equipment as well as informing subscribers or owners of the equipment of its effectiveness by knowing the number of calls during any given time period. These call counts are maintained on counters in the announcement systems, and must be read by periodic inspection of the system.
Thus, while modern prior art announcement systems have been developed which dependably deliver natural-sounding announcements of both advertising material and information such as temperature and time of day, any changes to the announcement have required physical transportation of new recorded material from a remote recording location to the actual location of the announcement system. It has also required visual inspection of counting registers at the site of the announcement equipment to monitor the traffic.
Previous announcement systems, in order to minimize necessary maintenance trips to the equipment, have also used very accurate and very expensive oven-controlled crystals in an oscillator circuit for maintaining accurately the time of day clock. Such precise and expense oven-controlled crystals or similar arrangements have been used because, in the past, it has been considered cost effective to invest initially in a highly accurate system in order to avoid the expense of repeated service trips to the location of the announcement equipment in order to adjust the time-of-day clock.
It will therefore be appreciated by those skilled in the art that it is desirable to provide an automatic announcement system in which the above noted service requirements including change of announcement, change of voice character, change of time of day, and interrogation of registers reflecting traffic through the system, may be accomplished remotely without the requirement of having service personnel physically attend to the announcement equipment at its situs.